Report: fair use adds $2.2 trillion to US economy each year

A new report uses the methods normally designed to measure the economic …

It's common to see reports that stress the economic importance of copyright and the content owners who benefit from it; the Copyright Alliance says that "core copyright industries" generated $819 billion in the US in 2005, for instance. What's less common is to find studies that look at the economic impact of fair use. That was the goal behind a new report (PDF) from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA). Their provocative finding? "In 2006, fair use-related industry value added was $2.2 trillion, 16.6 percent of total US current dollar GDP."

The CCIA hired an economic consulting firm to run the numbers on various US industries that rely on certain fair use privileges. The list is broader than you might think: Internet broadcasting, data hosting and processing, audio and video equipment manufacturing, electronic auctions, radio and television broadcasting, and many more all rely on certain elements of fair use.

The "photographic and photocopying equipment manufacturing" industry, for example, relies on the Sony principle (that devices capable of substantial noninfringing uses should remain legal even though they could threaten some copyright owners) for its very existence. Radio and TV broadcasters rely on fair use exemptions for criticism, news reporting, and parody. Even search engines like Google and Yahoo rely on fair use to republish tiny snippets of web sites in their search results and to store thumbnails of copyrighted images. YouTube has even relied on a "safe harbor" defense enshrined in copyright law to keep out of trouble even when copyrighted works are posted to its service.

"In our highly competitive markets, technology innovators depend both upon copyright protection and its limits," writes Ed Black, the CCIA's CEO. "While CCIA holds copyrights like the copyright protecting this study, for example, we also benefit—along with the rest of the public—from limitations on the reach of copyright, such as the fact that copyright does not extend to the raw data that forms the basis of this study."

The report concludes that industries which rely on fair use for at least some of their revenues have seen significant growth over the course of this decade. Between 2002 and 2006, total revenue from these industries surged from $3.5 trillion to $4.5 trillion—a rate of growth faster than that of the general US economy.

Groups like the Copyright Alliance would prefer not to focus on these claims (which are derived from a WIPO-approved method for measuring the economic value of copyrights in the country, but are likely exaggerated by the fact that all of an industry's revenues are counted, not just those that stem from fair use), but instead on the need to give content creators even more rights.

In a response to the CCIA study, the Copyright Alliance said in a statement, "There is no fair use without original creative works. Period. It is like trying to imagine a librarian without books. All those who embrace fair use must understand this and support creators who are producing the works they so prize." Which is true, but it also seems to attack an argument that no one is making.

This isn't really a surprise. William Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google, points out that the Copyright Alliance has one real goal: strengthen copyrights for content owners. On his blog, Patry notes that "a review of its web site reveals that every position it discusses as having taken is pro-protection. And that's fine: Washington, D.C. is awash with partisan groups like this, on all sides of issues, on hundreds of topics."

Not everyone sees a contradiction between the positions espoused by the two groups; Microsoft, for instance, is a member of both.